The childhood curiosity of Jonathan Meades turned him into an intellectual
virtuoso, as his dazzling memoir shows

Writer, gastronome, television presenter, Francophile, Blues Brother lookalike, occasional photographer and all-round aesthetic crosspatch, Jonathan Meades is a man who gives the impression of knowing everything about everything in a way that hasn’t been possible since the 17th century. Certainly he takes a strong view about anything drawn into the vast force field of his sensibility. This memoir of his early life, An Encyclopaedia of Myself, is even more sulphurously opinionated (and much broader in scope) than Brian Sewell’s exquisitely vituperative autobiographies.

The omnivorous nature of the encyclopedia form makes an ideal framework for the contemplative musings of this virtuoso. Embracing any subject as long as it is arranged in alphabetical order, the book offers almost unlimited opportunities for the trotting-up of cherished hobby horses. In Meades’s case these include uncles, sudden death, the nastiness of post-war British architecture, post-war food, canals, the impenetrable mystery of his relations’ marriages, including his parents’, and lists.

Lord, how he loves a list. The entry headed “Names” begins: “I made lists. Why were people called Salmon, Pike, Gudgeon, Whiting, Chubb, Grayling, Roach, Haddock, Spratt, Bass? But not Tench, Minnow, Eel, Lamprey, Perch, Carp, Huss, Plaice.” He continues in this vein for a page before scourging the indifferent adults who declined to satisfy his curiosity: “I was adjudged tiresome or frivolous or time-wasting. Thus adults masked their ignorance and, worse, their incuriosity. My obsessive insistence on the acquisition of what was deemed useless knowledge was a goading reproach to them.” And now he’s made a life’s work of useless knowledge. Ha! Take that, ignorant incurious adults!

The memoir’s trajectory follows, in branchy, tangential fashion, Meades’s first two decades, from his conception in the spring of 1946 in a “bothy at Seathwaite in the hugh Deddon valley in Furness” to his arrival in London in 1964, a callow youth from Salisbury, eager to embark on a rake’s progress. (Luckily for him, he found lodgings in Holland Park with Augustus John’s daughter, Vivien, whose extensive collection of elderly Bohemian acquaintances “sort of made me their contemporary”).

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After demobilisation from the wartime Army, Meades’s father resumed his career as a rep for the biscuit company, Crawfords.

But it was his passion for game fishing that meant that Jonathan spent his formative years in Salisbury, near the Nadder, rather than in Northampton, where his father was offered a promotion in 1956, but turned it down on the grounds that there was no river. (The Nene didn’t count: it wasn’t a chalk stream).

Salisbury, with its rich mixture of clerics, Army types and hush-hush scientists from Porton Down, was an ideal breeding ground for a writer, and Meades, an only child, had ample opportunity to observe the preposterous foibles of the grown-up grotesques around him. The end of the war resulted in a generous superfluity of majors, bogus and otherwise. These bibulous and rather forlorn figures occupy a fat central slice of Meades’s narrative, not least because they tended to drift into teaching, perhaps under the impression that giving orders to other ranks was an adequate preparation for taking charge of small boys.

Not, give or take a savage beating or two, that Meades seems to have suffered unduly at their hands. Indeed, his memoir opens with an aggrieved riff on the fact that he was never sexually abused.

“I was pretty enough, but it takes more than prettiness,” he writes (the accompanying black-and-white snapshot, one of a series with which the memoir is embellished, rather contradicts the assertion of prettiness. The young Meades closely resembles the older: he looks like a small bulldog in a tweed jacket.)

A slashing caricaturist when delineating character, Meades is a hyperaesthetic miniaturist when it comes to the material world. There is an unforgettable description of an early sexual experience with a “jolie-laide apprentice hairdresser” called Miggy, prematurely curtailed when the greasy hotel sofa on which they were about to couple proved to harbour a “seething tide of maggots”.

More innocent traumas are described with equally piercing clarity. The lipless shop assistant who accused him of shoplifting a Dinky Tank Transporter from Salisbury W H Smith must be long dead now, but her shade will be shifting uneasily at Meades’s furious account of her false accusation.

Undiluted indignation, however elegantly expressed, can be as wearisome as concentrated nostalgia; but the fine flourish of Meades’s rage is tempered with a rare, reluctant tenderness, for a few selected adults, and for his younger self: “At the age of 16 I was already nostalgic for my childhood self,” he writes. “For the summers when I had been 10 and 11, knowing they wouldn’t come my way again…”

The result is a dazzling confection of grown-up sophistication and schoolboy intensity of feeling. Meades may be pushing 70 years old, but like a more literate William Brown or an angrier Nigel Molesworth, he is still energetically kicking at everything that comes his way.